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All posts for the month January, 2014

As I mentioned in Old Crap, part 1, a blender user creates all kinds of edge projects, experiments, and goodies for clients-who-never-were, and then they just sit around gathering dust. Some are garbage, but some are really cool! I’m trying to dig through the closet, find all those files and give ’em some daylight in the land of Creative Commons.

So here’s a bug monster. When dynamic sculpting came out, I started a lil project to learn it. Much further down the rabbit hole, I realized the practice file served no point, but had lots of hours invested in it. I bequeath it to you now, do what you will with it.

Environment maps shot via light probe have some problems you don’t see with full-on panoramas. The distortion around the probe’s rim will pull away from some detail, culminating in the blind spot behind the probe. This means you have to make hard decisions about what gets distorted. If several things are important, how do you put them in a heirarchy?

I usually try to make the angle from me to the probe to the sun 90 degrees. The pier at Anthony’s is one example where I make an exception. Since half this landscape is a view of the water, you’d end up using this in 3D scenes that also are at a water’s edge. So wouldn’t it stink to jam all those watery pixels into the rim distortion? But shooting parallel to the repeating boards of the pier also appealed as a detail to avoid distorting. I shot a little of everything.

Not that I’m trashing probes. Don’t forget, if you’re shooting a full-on panorama, you’re way more likely to have some jogger and his dog ruin your scene, or have the clouds and light shift over the time it takes to shoot. And who wants to slave over 2 gigs of CR2 files, just to make a single EXR that crashes Blender anyway?

Just to reiterate, these HDR environment maps are perfect for the small time crook. Because I use a probe, they’re much faster to make. My 3D scenes are usually budgeted such that any HDR environment is already above and beyond, so doing a full-on panorama stitch would be WAAAAAY out of scope. If you’re like me, these are right up your alley.

Last week’s HDR pack had a Blender file with a Cycles setup, if you’re not sure how to use them. I prefer the .HDR over .EXR; although you have to type in ludicrous values for the environment strength (.0005, which rounds up visually to look like it’s .001), you can REALLY see the potency of any given HDR pixel, especially when cranked through the gamma. But the EXR ends up a bigger file size, so it might be better data 😛

Sometimes I look back at my old files and am shocked at how many tiny projects I make, but because they’re just experiments, the project never gets off the ground, or for various reasons didn’t end up getting used, they never see the light of day. Don’t they deserve to see the light of day? I’m gonna start putting this stuff on the internet for y’all.

Can I do an HDR environment map a week for 2014? Let’s see! Last week I dropped some old biddies I had in storage, but this week I went out and shot a nice empty parking lot. I threw in a .blend file with a cycles setup, for those unfamiliar with an environment map’s uses.

Hiding out in the shelves of my books, I discovered a mysterious sketchbook that I never scanned! Probably because it was started 3 months before my baby was born, and thus existed in a very tertiary time. A bit of everything; some lifedrawing, some monsters, some animals, etc.

“Cuncant that another would finish his sentences for him, he druider would smilabit eggways.” Drawing brainstorm technique: pick a line at random from Finnegan’s Wake, and try to draw it. http://finwake.com/